Friday, January 29, 2016

A Team of Hamas ‘Warriors’ Was Killed This Week. The Reason Has Israelis Worried. | TheBlaze.com

A Team of Hamas ‘Warriors’ Was Killed This Week. The Reason Has Israelis Worried. | TheBlaze.com:

“There were 11 resistance men inside. Three of them escaped in the first hour after the accident,” he said, using the “resistance” euphemism frequently invoked to describe what westerners would view as terrorism.

The Times of Israel noted that Hamas tried to “keep a lid on the disaster” by preventing local media from initially reporting on the incident and by at first accusing Israel of intentionally flooding the tunnel.

The Israeli military checked into the residents’ reports of overnight banging noises but determined that there were no underground tunnels in that area, Channel 10 reported.

During the 2014 fighting with Israel, Hamas sent heavily-armed fighters into Israel via attack tunnels."

Obama's Hug-A-Thug Policies Backfire In NYC, St. Paul Schools

Obama's Hug-A-Thug Policies Backfire In NYC, St. Paul Schools | Stock News & Stock Market Analysis - IBD:
As serious crimes in schools soar, teachers unions in New York and other cities are pushing back against new softer student conduct codes inspired by the president’s national anti-discipline strategy.
New York public schools are dealing with escalating classroom chaos after adopting minority-friendly discipline policies that the Education Department pushed to close so-called “racial disparities” in suspensions and expulsions.
Educrats have been threatening school districts with lawsuits and funding cuts wherever if finds disparities.
High-school kids are getting “warning cards” for offenses that normally would result in a criminal summons and suspension, such as drug possession and disorderly conduct.
Liberal New York Mayor Bill de Blasio says crime is down in the schools, but it’s not.
It’s just that schools are ignoring it.
The only thing that’s down is suspensions.
In fact, “Forcible sex offenses are up 69%, and assaults are up 40% in New York schools after de Blasio implemented the Obama administration’s policy of replacing suspensions with ‘restorative justice,’ a kind of talk therapy — even for serious offenses such as fighting, arson and assault,” former Education Department civil-rights attorney Hans Bader said.
“This type of turning your back on illegal behavior is grooming criminals,” complained the head of Teamsters Local 237, which represents New York school safety ­officers.
Meanwhile, in a shocking election, the St. Paul, Minn., teachers union led a campaign to oust the city’s liberal school board that has allowed unruly students to bully teachers and students.
Classroom violence in St. Paul is so bad that the 3,800-member union has threatened to call a strike until school safety’s restored.
...“There’s no consequences,” complained a veteran St. Paul high school teacher.
“We are teaching our kids it’s OK to disrupt the learning environment, and all they’ll get is a slap on the hand.”
Obama’s racial bean-counting is just making inner-city schools more dangerous. 
And the biggest losers are minority kids who can’t afford to escape them.

UMass students can earn academic credit for building LGBTQA-themed electronic light displays

UMass students can earn academic credit for building LGBTQA-themed electronic light displays - The College Fix:
"Take some electrical engineering and throw in a little LGBTQA and what have you got? “Queer Lights.”
No, seriously.
It’s the newest class at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Students can earn academic credit for literally “building LGBTQA-themed electronic light displays.”
The 1-credit course, first reported on by The Liberty Standard, was announced Jan. 27 via the “Engineering E-News Letter.”
“‘Queer Lights’ will cast light on lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and asexual (LGBTQA) topics while the students in the class literally cast light–building LGBTQA-themed electronic light displays,” an online description of the course states.
“An engineering professor will teach the students how to create and program the displays, and the director of the Stonewall Center will lead the students in discussions about LGBTQA issues in the news and in their own lives.”
“Some of the topics to be covered include the intersections of racial and LGBTQA identities, the campus climate for LGBTQA students, and the legal and political rights of LGBTQA people today.”"

Comedian Goes Undercover to Test Out the ‘Gun Show Loophole’ — Watch How Gun Sellers React to Requests | Video | TheBlaze.com

Comedian Goes Undercover to Test Out the ‘Gun Show Loophole’ — Watch How Gun Sellers React to Requests | Video | TheBlaze.com:

"With the debate over gun control in America raging on fiercer than ever, conservative pundit and comedian Steven Crowder decided he would conduct an experiment to see if it really is as easy to purchase automatic weapons as some liberal politicians and celebrities have claimed."



Kids' lead levels high in many Michigan cities

Kids' lead levels high in many Michigan cities


Across Michigan, in cities large and small, lead poisoning continues to plague children, limiting them in school and on the playground.
While much of the state’s focus on lead has rightly been on poisoned water in Flint, the metal continues to turn up annually in the bodies of thousands of children across the state, at percentages well above the numbers that raised red flags in Flint.
Elevated blood-lead levels are seen in a higher percentage of children in parts of Grand Rapids, Jackson, Detroit, Saginaw, Muskegon, Holland and several other cities, proof that the scourge of lead has not been eradicated despite decades of public health campaigns and hundreds of millions of dollars spent to find and eliminate it.
“This is still an issue. It’s not going away,” said Dr. Eden Wells, chief medical executive of the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
Many in the state were shocked earlier this year by the findings in Flint: After a steady decline in lead levels, they began to rise in 2014 after the city switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. That change in water supply, experts say, triggered the increase in lead poisoning because the more corrosive river water may have stripped lead from older pipes and bled it into the drinking supply.


That uptick in Flint, noted by researchers, is what finally forced state officials to confront the dangers in the city’s water. Five percent of the Flint children tested had elevated levels of lead, though certain parts of the city had much higher percentages.
Now consider lead exposure rates in some other parts of Michigan:
■In Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park, 10 ZIP codes saw more than 10 percent of children tested have a positive test in 2014. That was nearly 1,000 of the 7,263 children tested, or 13.5 percent.
■In Grand Rapids, nearly 1 in 10 children of those tested in four ZIP codes tested positive in 2014.
■And in Adrian in south-central Michigan, more than 12 percent of the 640 children tested showed elevated levels of lead.
“We do have areas in our state and areas in our country where children are at risk,” Wells said.

earth :: a global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions

earth :: a global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions:


Lunch video-----Muslims Are Taking Over The World at an ALARMING Rate

Noon-toon

Cartoons: Nate Beeler for January 27, 2016

Jump this! Olympics to let men compete as women

Jump this! Olympics to let men compete as women:

“But with the International Olympic Committee’s ruling that men claiming to be women can compete against woman athletes, a new world record in insanity and unfairness has been established,” he said."

The Clintons, a lifetime of criminal corruption

Hillary Clinton ‘destroyed’ her personal records
A case of ‘possible obstruction’ of justice
Sources say redacted portions of memoranda contain a draft indictment of Mrs. Clinton
Never-before-published prosecution memos from April 1998 say Clinton’s ‘sworn statements to the RTC, the FDIC, the Senate and the House of Representatives and to OIC … reflected and embodied materially inaccurate stories’
A 4/10/98 OIC memo uses terms ‘crime(s),’ ‘criminal,’ ‘fraudulent,’ ‘misrepresented,’ ‘inaccurate,’ ‘deceive,’ ‘mislead,’ ‘misstatement,’ and ‘concealed’ 27 times in 20 pages to describe actions by Clinton and Whitewater associates

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today released 246 pages of previously undisclosed Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) internal memos revealing extensive details about the investigation of Hillary Rodham Clinton for possible criminal charges involving her activities in the Whitewater/Castle Grande fraudulent land transaction scandal.  
The memos are “statements of the case” against Hillary Clinton and Webster Lee “Webb” Hubbell, Hillary Clinton’s former law partner and former Associate Attorney General in the Clinton Justice Department.  
Ultimately, the memos show that prosecutors declined to prosecute Clinton because of the difficulty of persuading a jury to convict a public figure as widely known as Clinton. (Links to the full set of documents are below.)
Although some details of the documents have been previously reported, Judicial Watch is today publicly releasing the independent counsel prosecution memos for the first time.  The prosecution memos—portions of which were heavily redacted—were obtained by Judicial Watch from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
An April 10, 1998, memo summarizes “the crimes under consideration”
What, then are the crimes under consideration? Between January 1994 and February 1996 both Hillary Clinton and [Webster] Hubbell made numerous sworn statements to the RTC, the FDIC, the Senate and the House of Representatives, and to the OIC. Each of these reflected and embodied materially inaccurate stories relating to: how RLF [Clinton and Hubbell’s Rose Law Firm] came to be retained by MGSL [the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan]; Hillary Clinton’s role in the IDC/Castle Grande venture; Hillary Clinton’s role in representing MGSL; Hillary Clinton’s role in representing MGSL before state agencies’; Hubbell’s representations to the RTC [Resolution Trust Corporation] and FDIC regarding Hillary Clinton’s role in the IDC/Castle Grande venture; and the removal of records from the RLF. The question, generally, is not whether the statements are inaccurate, but whether they are willfully so.
The records released today by Judicial Watch were prepared for an “All OIC Attorneys” meeting on April 27, 1998, at which a final decision about whether to indict Clinton and Hubbell was the subject of a lengthy debate.  The records explore in detail the role Clinton played in the fraudulent Castle Grande transaction, the role of Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, and the subsequent lengthy cover-up as the Clintons sought and won the White House.
Clinton, according to prosecutors, drafted an option agreement that concealed from federal bank examiners a fraudulent $300,000 cross-loan in the Castle Grande transaction.  Her concealment of her role in this fraudulent transaction, including the hiding of her Rose Law Firm billing records concerning her legal work for Madison, were the subject of an OIC obstruction of justice probe.
The 1998 memoranda include substantial evidence depicting Clinton and her former Rose Law Firm partners—Hubbell, and Vincent Foster, both of whom went on to senior positions in the Bill Clinton presidency—as  complicit in activities that “facilitated crimes.”
Page 18 of the OIC documents notes that Clinton “destroyed” her personal records of her work for Madison Guaranty. Page 39 of the documents notes:
Section II contains a chronological background and contextual summary of the investigation so that the facts relating to possible obstruction can be placed in the context of the ongoing investigation by OIC.
The evidence in the new documents covers:
  • Castle Grande. “The Castle Grande transactions were crimes.” The statement is followed by an explicit six-paragraph dissection of the land-flipping scheme.
  • Madison Guaranty S&L. Clinton minimized the role she played in seeking state regulatory assistance for the corrupt savings and loan, headed by key Clinton financial and political supporter James McDougal. At the time, Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas.
  • Vincent Foster and the Missing Rose Law Firm Billing Records. The Rose records were a key piece of evidence in the probe. They were missing for years. After Foster’s July 1993 suicide, the OIC documents note, where the billing records went “is an open question….  Several pieces of evidence support the inference that personal documents which Hillary Clinton did not want disclosed were located in Foster’s office at the time of his death and then removed.”
  • Removal of Records from Vincent Foster’s Office. “ [O]n the afternoon of July 21st Bernard Nussbaum, then White House Counsel, initially agreed to allow two career DOJ employees to review the documents in Foster’s office for evidence that might shed light on the cause of his death.  That evening and the next morning Nussbaum, Hillary Clinton, Susan Thomases, and Maggie Williams (Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff) exchanged 10 separate phones calls … That morning, according to the DOJ employees, Nussbaum changed his mind and refused to allow the DOJ prosecutors to review the documents; instead, he reviewed them himself and segregated several as ‘personal’ to the Clintons.”
  • Hiding the Billing Records “On the evening of July 22nd, Thomas Castleton … assisted Williams [Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton chief of staff] in carrying a box of personal documents up to … a closet in Hillary Clinton’s office. The closet is approximately 30 feet from the table in the Book Room, where the billing records were found 2 years later…. There is a circumstantial case that the records were left on the table by Hillary Clinton. She is the only individual in the White House who had a significant interest in them and she is one of only 3 people known to have had them in her possession since their creation in February 1992.”
  • Buying the Silence of a Co-Conspirator? Hubbell, criticized by the OIC for his lack of cooperation with the probe, received several “jobs” from Clinton supporters for which he apparently did little or no work. During a taped conversation in prison, Hubbell appears to acknowledge that he withheld information from the OIC. Several of Hubbell’s job-providers fell most strongly within the hush money allegation. The OIC notes eight of them on page 197.
  • The Missing Draft Indictment. More than 60 pages of the OIC memoranda are completely censored, withheld by the National Archives. Multiple sources tell Judicial Watch that these pages include a full draft indictment of Clinton and Hubbell, as well as a detailed “order of Evidence” list.
Read it all.
These people are CROOKS!

Bankruptcy and Bailouts: Where Puerto Rico Went Wrong

Bankruptcy and Bailouts: Where Puerto Rico Went Wrong - Reason.com
Stop me if you've heard this one before:
A government, run by a succession of politicians, spent frivolously for decades and repeatedly ignored all the warning signs of looming fiscal disaster, and now that it has arrived, is begging for a bailout. 
No, I'm not talking about Greece. 
This time, it's Puerto Rico. 
And the Republican-controlled Congress is seriously considering a bailout.
Even Washington's out-of-touch cronies recognize that a simple cash bailout would be too politically toxic.
But they've come up with an alternative that may have some appeal but also has very problematic features: bankruptcy.
It's not hard to see where Puerto Rico went wrong. 

  • About one-third of its working population works for the government. 
  • Its bloated workforce accounts for more than two-thirds of the budget, while onerous labor laws and regulations strangle the economy and prevent it from keeping pace with the growth of government. Compared to the island's lower standard of living, generous federal welfare benefits also contribute to an extremely low 50 percent participation rate in the labor force. 
  • That, along with the high shipping costs imposed by the Jones Act, are problems that Congress can help solve, but the rest is up to Puerto Rico itself.

The appeal of bankruptcy is that, in theory, it lets municipalities get out of the bad contracts that are causing the financial problems, such as excessive pension promises.
Puerto Rico, like the District of Columbia, is not granted access to Chapter 9 bankruptcy under federal law.
Hence, the call to change the law..."

Democrats control-----Neighbors Losing Patience Where Plows Still Haven’t Cleared Streets

Neighbors Losing Patience Where Plows Still Haven’t Cleared Streets « CBS Baltimore
BALTIMORE (WJZ) — The dig out from the weekend snow storm continues across Maryland.
Derek Valcourt with the growing frustrations in some areas where plows still haven’t cleared the streets.
What’s making some people bitter is trying to understand why all of the streets around them have been plowed, but they’re still stuck.
Along Millvale Road in the Millford Mill area of Baltimore County, neighbors are losing patience, knowing all the surrounding streets have been plowed.
“It’s been four days and no one has come down our block yet,” said Tony Redd.
“How’d you forget this one? That’s amazing,” said Humphrey Cash.
They’re still waiting, despite repeated calls to the county.
“Well, we’ve probably never had this magnitude of snow before, but nevertheless, you still should have been in and done something in four or five days. Come on now,” said Cash.
One of the concerns–as the snow melts during the day then refreezes at night, it’s getting a lot heavier.
Residents are worried the plows alone won’t be able to move it..."

Time runs out on Al Gore’s global-warming Armageddon

Time runs out on Al Gore’s global-warming Armageddon:

"Average temperature has remained steady for 15 years and some climate scientists suggest the Earth is on the verge of another ice age. Yet Fitch observed environmentalists keep deploying hysterical rhetoric to win over Americans to their cause.

“One of the problems with the environmental movement is that no good news is ever good news,” said Fitch. “The fact that the polar ice caps haven’t melted is seen as a reason to fight harder for their cause rather than give pause for consideration. One would figure that their dire predictions not materializing would be seen as a ray of hope, but instead activists see it as just further reason to preach doom and gloom.”

NASA Holds 'Day of Remembrance' on 30th Anniversary of Challenger Explosion

PHOTO: NASAs Space Shuttle Challenger lifts off from Kennedy Space Center in this NASA handout photo dated Jan. 28, 1986. NASA Holds 'Day of Remembrance' on 30th Anniversary of Challenger Explosion - ABC News: "Thirty years ago today (yesterday), the nation watched on live television as the Challenger shuttle carrying seven people, including a high school teacher, exploded into a fireball 73 seconds after liftoff.
On an unusually cold January morning, the astronauts' families and other onlookers watched as the Challenger lifted off from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, for what was supposed to be a seven day trip. Shortly after liftoff an orange fireball and smoke could be seen in the sky.
"Obviously a major malfunction," Stephen Nesbitt at mission control said, according to transcripts of the Challenger disaster."

AM Fruitcake


History for January 29

History for January 29 - On-This-Day.com:
Thomas Paine 1737, William McKinley (U.S.) 1843, W.C. Fields 1880 


Katherine Ross 1942, Tom Selleck 1945, Oprah Winfrey 1954 


1845 - Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" was published for the first time in the "New York Evening Mirror." 


1850 - Henry Clay introduced in the Senate a compromise bill on slavery that included the admission of California into the Union as a free state. 


1856 - Britain's highest military decoration, the Victoria Cross, was founded by Queen Victoria. 


1886 - The first successful petrol-driven motorcar, built by Karl Benz, was patented. 


1940 - The W. Atlee Burpee Seed Company displayed the first tetraploid flowers at the New York City Flower Show. 


1958 - Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were married. 


1958 - Charles Starkweather was captured by police in Wyoming


1999 - The U.S. Senate delivered subpoenas for Monica Lewinsky and two presidential advisers for private, videotaped testimony in the impeachment trial. 

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Challenger: President Reagan's Challenger Disaster Speech - 1/28/86

VIDEO: FOX NEWS Anchor Under Fire After Dropping THIS BOMBSHELL Comment About Allah ⋆ US Herald

VIDEO: FOX NEWS Anchor Under Fire After Dropping THIS BOMBSHELL Comment About Allah ⋆ US Herald:

"Once again another Fox News host is under attack by the same group of progressive activists that attempt to denigrate those brave enough to speak out.

This time it’s news personality, host and anchor Gretchen Carlson currently serving as anchor of Fox News Channel's (FNC), The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson (weekdays 2-3PM/ET)."

University forces students to wear Fitbits and punishes them for not exercising enough

University forces students to wear Fitbits and punishes them for not exercising enough - The College Fix:
Big Brother is watching you.
In this case, your footsteps – and the “brother” is a religious authority.
Oral Roberts University, a Christian school in Oklahoma, is taking health to a new level by requiring incoming freshmen and transfer students to walk about five miles per day as measured by Fitbit fitness trackers that they must purchase.
The tech-enabled mandate is an update to a previous policy that required all students to manually log aerobic points in a fitness journal.
...Grades docked if your steps and heart rate fall short
ORU claims the Fitbit mandate – 10,000 steps per day and an unstated heart rate, which get automatically logged into a student’s online “gradebook” – came from the bottom up.
“Students have asked us about wearable devices for the university’s physical fitness initiative. 
So we decided to take the advice of our students,” Provost Kathaleen Reid-Martinez told The College Fix in an phone interview.

What do the yellow-ish countries have in common?

What do the yellow-ish countries have in common? | Intellectual Takeout:

Transparency Institute released its international Corruption Perceptions Index.

Transparency International released its 2015 Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking the world’s countries by levels of corruption, in January 2016. Why a “perceptions” index? According to the institute, it’s the best way:
“Corruption generally comprises illegal activities, which are deliberately hidden and only come to light through scandals, investigations or prosecutions. There is no meaningful way to assess absolute levels of corruption in countries or territories on the basis of hard empirical data. Possible attempts to do so, such as by comparing bribes reported, the number of prosecutions brought or studying court cases directly linked to corruption, cannot be taken as definitive indicators of corruption levels. Instead, they show how effective prosecutors, the courts or the media are in investigating and exposing corruption. Capturing perceptions of corruption of those in a position to offer assessments of public sector corruption is the most reliable method of comparing relative corruption levels across countries.”
With that in mind, here’s the map of the perception of corruption globally:
The top ten, least-corrupt countries are the following:
  1. Denmark
  2. Finland
  3. Sweden
  4. New Zealand
  5. Netherlands
  6. Norway
  7. Switzerland
  8. Singapore
  9. Canada
  10. Germany, Luxembourg, United Kingdom (3-way tie)
Since you’re probably curious, the United States ranks sixteenth in the world for the lowest perceived levels of corruption.